One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (22 page)

“Excellent,” said Plum, who closed the door and spun a wheel on the front to effect a secure lock. He then pressed a button, and there was a low humming noise, which gradually increased in pitch as the simile started to move around the accelerator. There was a dial marked “Absurd Velocity,” and the needle began to rise as the simile zipped round at ever increasing speeds.

“The Council of Genres is very keen to have this up and running as soon as possible,” he said, staring at the dials carefully. “Synthesizing metaphor is the holy grail of the BookWorld, if you don’t count finding the Holy Grail, which confusingly is
also
the holy grail of the BookWorld.”

The Large Metaphor Collider had by now wound itself up to a whine so high-pitched that I couldn’t hear it, and all the equipment on the desk was vibrating. As the needle nudged up to .95 Absurd, Plum took a deep breath and pressed the red button, which instantaneously brought indisputable fact into the path of the absurdly fast simile.

It is difficult to describe what happened next. The machine changed from being something akin to an engine with a throttle stuck wide open to that of a Brave New Dawn. I saw the Clouds Open and the Rain Stop. The Lark Ascended, and I saw Saint John on the island of Patmos, and a New Heaven and a New Earth. I saw—But in another second, those feelings had vanished, and all we were left with was the collider, humming down to speed.

“What was that?” I asked.

“A sudden flash of pure metaphor,” replied Plum excitedly. “This kind of event usually liberates about a hundred and twenty PicoMets.”

“Is that safe?”

“Don’t worry,” he said with a smile. “The background metaphor level is about fifty PicoMets, and a fatal dose is up around the forty-MilliMet mark. You’d have to do something daft for that to happen, although there have been accidents. A few years ago, a colleague of mine was experimenting with a few grams of dead metaphor when it went critical. He was bathed in almost a hundred MilliMets and started barking on about Prometheus stealing fire from the gods before he exploded into a ball of fire and ascended into the night sky, where he could be seen for many weeks, a salutary lesson of the dangers of playing with metaphor. Wrecked the laboratory, too. Let me see.”

Professor Plum pulled the single sheet of onionskin from the annihilation chamber and looked at it, brows knitted. The paper had recorded the subword particles. Some were dotted, others colored, some hatched. There was even a legend at the bottom explaining what each one meant. Fiction has no time for lengthy and potentially confusing data analysis, so experimentation is always followed by easily interpretable and generally unequivocal results.

“That’s alliteration,” said Plum, tracing the various paths with his finger. “Anaphora, epistrophe, epanalepsis, analepsis, hyperbole and polyptoton.”

In all, he could list twenty-nine submeaning particles, but of pure metaphor there was no evidence at all.

“You felt it, though, didn’t you?”

I answered that I had. A feeling of a new dawn and old things being swept away.

Plum stared at the paper for a long time. So long, in fact, that I thought he might have gone to sleep standing up and might need catching when he fell over.

“Well,” he said at last, “back to the drawing board.”

“But we felt something, didn’t we?” I said.

“Without proof we’ve got nothing,” he said in a resigned voice. “Perhaps metaphor has no mass. If so, I’m very surprised—although it might explain why Dark Reading Matter is undetectable. It could be mostly metaphorical. Come on. Let’s get you real.”

The professor led me to the back of the workshop, past the entrance to a scrubbing device for declichéing otherwise healthy idioms and down a corridor to a door obscured by several discarded packing cases and a stack of unread copies of the almost fatally dull
JurisTech Review.

“We haven’t used the Jumper for over eighteen months,” he explained, struggling with a padlock that had grown rusty with age. “Not since the imaginatively titled ‘RealWorld Travel Ban’ banned all travel to the RealWorld.”

“Why the ban?”

“I didn’t ask, and neither should you. If anyone at the CoG gets wind of this, you and I are nothing but text.”

I didn’t like the sound of this.

“But Bradshaw—”

“Bradshaw is a good man,” interrupted Plum, “but in matters like this he’d deny he even knew you. And me. And himself, it it came to that. I agree with him. To maintain the integrity of Jurisfiction, I would accept being reduced to a bucket of graphemes. And so should you.”

He left me thinking about this and pulled opened the door. He paused, the interior of the lab a dark hole.

“You can leave now if you want to.”

“No, I’m okay,” I said, even if I wasn’t. “Let’s just get on with it, yes?”

He turned on the light to reveal a large room that was musty and hung with cobwebs. Occasionally there was a low rumble, and dust trickled from the ceiling.

“The Carnegie Underpass,” explained Plum. “It runs directly overhead.”

In the middle of the room was a large machine that looked like a collection of sieves, each lined up one in front of the other. The sieves began with one that might have been designed to make chips, so long as you could hurl a potato at it fast enough, and the rest were of rapidly decreasing mesh, until the penultimate was no more than a fine wire gauze. The last of all was a thin sheet of silver that shimmered with the microscopic currents of air that moved around the workshop. Beyond this was the wide end of a copper funnel with the sharp end finishing in a point no bigger than a pin—and beyond this a small drop of blue something-or-other within a localized gravitational field that kept it suspended in the air. Around the room was an array of computers covered with more dials, levers, switches and meters than I had ever seen before.

“What exactly is it?” I asked, not unnaturally and with a certain degree of trepidation.

“It’s the Large Textual Sieve Array,” he explained. “Although the construction and methodology of Textual Sieves remain generally unexplained, they can be used for a number of functions. Cross-triangulation searches, the ‘locking’ of text within books—and, more controversially, for making fictional people real, even if for only a short period.”

“How long?”

“I can send you out for forty-eight hours, but Bradshaw insisted you go for only twelve. As soon as that time is up, you’ll spontaneously return. We’ll send you in at midday, and you’ll be out at midnight—pumpkin hour. If you want to stay longer, you’ll have to Blue Fairy, but then you’re there for good and you’ll have to suffer the worst rigors of being real—aging, death and daytime television.

The twelve-hour pumpkin option suited me fine, and I told him so. I’d heard many stories about the RealWorld, and although it sounded an interesting place to visit, you’d not want to live there.

“So how does it work?” I asked.

“Simplicity itself. You see this howitzer?”

He pointed at a large-caliber cannon that was pointed directly at the sieves. It was mounted on a small carriage and was gaily decorated with red stars and had THE FLYING ZAMBINIS painted on the side.

“You are placed in this cannon and then fired into the array at .346 Absurd speed. The mesh of the first sieve is quite broad, to break down your base description into individual words. The next breaks the words down into letters, and then the letters are divided further into subcalligraphic particles, until you hit the silver sheet, which has holes in it one-tenth the size of a polyptoton. After that,” he concluded as he tapped the large funnel, “your descriptive dust is compressed in the Pittmanizer to a concentrated pellet of ultradense prose, where the several thousand words of your description take up less space than one millionth of a period. Put it another way: If all Fiction were compressed to the same degree, it would take up the space of an average-size rabbit.”

“I like comparative factoids like that.”

“Me, too. This tiny speck of you is then injected at speed into a drop of AntiBook, where your essence is rebuilt into something closely resembling human. By controlling the Sieve Array, I can drop you wherever you want in the RealWorld.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Quite a lot, actually,” he admitted, “but only fleetingly. You’ll barely have enough time to scream before it will be over. The return is not so dramatic. You’ll simply find yourself in our arrivals suite, which is just behind that door.”

“Do you have any advice?”

“I’ve never been there myself,” confessed Plum, “but they say if you can handle the first ten minutes, you’re good for the whole twelve hours. If you can’t hack it, then just find a quiet wardrobe in which to hide until the free return brings you back.”

I found his comments disconcerting.

“What is there that one might not be able to handle?” Professor Plum made a clicky noise with his tongue. “It’s highly disorderly,” he explained, “not like here. There is no easily definable plot, and you can run yourself ragged wondering what the significance can be of a chance encounter. You’ll also find that for the most part there is no shorthand to the narrative, so everything happens in a long and painfully drawn-out sequence. Apparently the talk can be confusing—for the most part, people just say the first thing that comes into their heads.”

“Is it as bad as they say it is?”

“I’ve heard it’s worse. Here in the BookWorld, we say what needs to be said for the story to proceed. Out there? Well, you can discount at least eighty percent of chat as just meaningless drivel.”

“I never thought the percentage was
that
high.”

“In some individuals it can be as high as ninety-two percent. The people to listen to are the ones who don’t say very much.”

“Oh.”

“There are fun things, too,” said Plum, sensing my disappointment. “You’ll get used to it in the end, but if you go out there accepting that seventy-five percent of talk is utter twaddle and eighty-five percent of people’s lives are spent dithering around, you won’t go far wrong. But above all don’t be annoyed or distracted when random things happen for absolutely no purpose.”

“There’s always a purpose,” I said, amused by the notion of utter pointlessness, “even if you don’t understand what it is until much later.”

“That’s the big difference between here and there,” said Plum. “When things happen after a randomly pointless event, all that follows is simply unintended consequences, not a coherent narrative thrust that propels the story forward.”

I rolled the idea of unintended consequences around in my head. “Nope,” I said finally, “you’ve got me on that one.”

“It confuses me, too,” admitted Plum, “but that’s the RealWorld for you. A brutal and beautiful place, run for the most part on passion, fads, incentives and mathematics. A
lot
of mathematics.”

“That’s it?” I asked, astonished by the brevity in which Plum could sum up the world that had, after all, made us.

“Pretty much,” he replied glumly. “And some very good cuisine. And the smells. You’ll like those, I assure you. And real sex—not like the oddly described stuff we have to make do with in here.”

“I assure you I’m not going to the RealWorld for the sex.”

“When tourism was permitted, many visitors used it for little else. Anything that is impossible to describe adequately in the BookWorld was much sought and, coincidentally, usually beginning with
c
: cooking, copulation, Caravaggio, coastlines and chocolate. Will you do me a favor and bring some back? I adore chocolate. As much as you can carry, in fact. And none of that Lindt or Nestlé muck—Cadbury’s the thing.”

I promised him I would, and he opened the hatch at the back of the cannon.

“Good luck,” he said. “Don’t worry if it seems a bit odd to begin with. You’re made in the image of the flesh-and-bloods, so there’s nothing you can’t figure out as long as you keep your wits about you. It helps if you crouch tight, like a hedgehog. It’s why Mrs. Tiggy-winkle was so good at moving across.”

I crawled inside and crunched myself up into the fetal position. Plum instructed me to hold my breath when he reached the count of two, as it helped to have a breath in you when you arrived, since breathing out can give a good indication of how breathing actually works. I thanked him for the advice, and he closed the hatch. I looked along the barrel of the cannon to the muzzle, and beyond that to the series of textual sieves that would chop me into the smallest component parts imaginable. I admit it, I was nervous. I waited for about a minute in the gloom, and then, when nothing had happened, I called out.

“Sorry!” came Plum’s voice. “I’m just winding her up to speed. If I don’t get you to
exactly
.346 of Absurd Speed, all you’ll be is a tattered mass of text caught in the sieves. If I fire you too fast, you’ll be embedded in the back of the laboratory.”

“What would happen then?”

“Paper over you, I suppose.”

I wasn’t particularly reassured by this but waited patiently for another half minute until I heard a faint whine that grew in pitch as Plum counted down from ten. When he got to five, the whine had grown so loud I could hardly hear him, so I guessed when two would be and took a deep breath. I was just thinking that perhaps this wasn’t such a great idea after all and I should really be getting back to my series and staying there for a sensible period of time—such as forever—when there was a noise like a thousand metallic frogs all croaking at the same time and my body was suddenly skewered by a thousand hot needles. Before I could cry out, the pain passed, and after a low hum and a sensation of treacle, Klein Blue and Wagner all mixed together but not very well, there was a brilliant flash of light.